MR. BLAKE,--I received your letter just as I was rushing to Fire Island beach to recover what remained of Margaret Fuller, and rea...d it on the way. That event and its train, as much as anything, have prevented my answering it before. It is wisest to speak when you are spoken to. I will now endeavor to reply, at the risk of having nothing to say. I find that actual events, notwithstanding the singular prominence which we all allow them, are far less real than the creations of my imagination. They are truly visionary and insignificant,--all that we commonly call life and death,--and affect me less than my dreams. This petty stream which from time to time swells and carries away the mills and bridges of our habitual life, and that mightier stream or ocean on which we securely float,--what makes the difference between them? I have in my pocket a button which I ripped off the coat of the Marquis of Ossoli, on the seashore, the other day. Held up, it intercepts the light,--an actual button,--and yet all the life that it is connected with is less substantial to me, and interests me less, than my faintest dream. Our thoughts are the epochs in our lives: all else is but as a journal of the winds that blew while we were here.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
He is not a true man of science who does not bring some sympathy to his studies, and expect to learn something by behavior as well... as by application. It is childish to rest in the discovery of mere coincidences, or of partial and extraneous laws. The study of geometry is a petty and idle exercise of the mind, if it is applied to no larger system than the starry one.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When I looked into a liturgy of the Church of England, printed near the end of the last century, in order to find a service applic...able to the case of Brown, I found that the only martyr recognized and provided for by it was King Charles the First, an eminent scamp. Of all the inhabitants of England and of the world, he was the only one, according to this authority, whom that church had made a martyr and saint of; and for more than a century it had celebrated his martyrdom, so called, by an annual service. What a satire on the Church is that!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Detection is, or ought to be, an exact science, and should be treated in the same cold and unemotional manner. You have attempted ...to tinge it with romanticism, which produces much the same effect as if you worked a love-story or an elopement into the fifth proposition of Euclid.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was a real treat when he'd read me Daisy Miller out loud. But we'd reached the point in our relationship when, in a straight ch...oice between him and Henry James, I'd have taken Henry James any day even if Henry James were dead and not much of a one for the girls when living, either.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Henry David Thoreau, who never earned much of a living or sustained a relationship with any woman that wasn't brotherly--who lived... mostly under his parents' roof ... who advocated one day's work and six days "off" as the weekly round and was considered a bit of a fool in his hometown ... is probably the American writer who tells us best how to live comfortably with our most constant companion, ourselves.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We are playing with fire when we skip the years of three, four, and five to hurry children into being age six.... Every child has ...a right to his fifth year of life, his fourth year, his third year. He has a right to live each year with joy and self-fulfillment. No one should ever claim the power to make a child mortgage his today for the sake of tomorrow.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Early education can only promise to help make the third and fourth and fifth years of life good ones. It cannot insure without fai...l that any tomorrow will be successful. Nothing "fixes" a child for life, no matter what happens next. But exciting, pleasing early experiences are seldom sloughed off. They go with the child, on into first grade, on into the child's long life ahead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Those old faces, in Pasadena, California, and Tucson, Arizona, and Dallas, crumpling in hatred and fear at the mention of the Unit...ed Nations or those liberals in government who constitute for them the fifth column of communism, yearn for an America that is as far from the society of the present as is the extended family system in village India.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »